Hacker News: strstr

New comment by strstr in "Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics"

strstr — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:48:31 +0000

Does that make us the Biters?

New comment by strstr in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

strstr — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:53:02 +0000

Roughly 40 acre feet of water for the Lincoln DC. An acre of corn uses maybe a couple of acre feet a season. Corn irrigation alone uses tens of millions of acre feet of water per season in the USA.

New comment by strstr in "Reversing Factorio's RNG"

strstr — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:32:54 +0000

From the article:

> Sampling the current RNG through observations,

> Computing the current internal RNG state,

> Predicting the future internal states,

> Calculating corresponding quality levels for each future call, and finally

> Making use of the predicted levels with some adapters.

The entropy->seeds (internal RNG state) step took more math of course. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they could have extracted the seeds without the math with a bit of RE and memory inspection.

The version I did wasn’t predicting quality of course, it was predicting tie breakers

New comment by strstr in "Reversing Factorio's RNG"

strstr — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:54:24 +0000

I did an easier version of this in my college intro class. There was a class competition that involved rock paper scissors as a subcomponent, and ties were broken with randomness. You could rig Java’s prng so you would win all ties.

The prng was seeded with usec time at first call. I called the rng a bunch of times to harvest entropy, and scanned the plausible usec times to find the seed. Then I primed the prng so I would win ties.

Frankly, I assume I implemented this wrong, but the theory was there lol.

New comment by strstr in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

strstr — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 03:01:30 +0000

I always like to look at the windows for these “more attractive” buildings. They always lead me to believe the indoor experience is worse in some way. Either cramped or similar. Sometimes they imply a dark windowless rooms. Generally, they seem like they prioritize the appearance of the building over the experience of being inside the building, which is unambiguously the more important part of the building.

The funny one is the buildings that have better landscaping. A few of the buildings in the post only look attractive as a consequence of the green courtyard in front. If you cover up that part of the photo, they just don’t look as stunning compared to the other. Perhaps that’s an argument for traditional courtyards (fair enough), but it doesn’t imply the need for traditional building construction.

New comment by strstr in "Remote Attestation"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 06:51:20 +0000

(I’ll bite and try to steelman) How does a typical user verify that they are running the intended secure software?

New comment by strstr in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:06:14 +0000

You can definitely do this without sorting.

QuickSelect is average case n, and is, roughly, quick sort where you throw away one of the sides each time and recurse on the other. This has a fat tail for cases where you pick a bad pivot (similar to quicksort), but you can median-of-medians your way out of that problem if someone cares. (Median of medians being where you subdivide the array into, say, 5 arrays, recursively compute the median on those, and pick the middle median as your pivot, which guarantees linear progress per iteration)

New comment by strstr in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:00:22 +0000

I used to translate classic interview questions into not-spoiled-on-the-internet ones by doing this kind of batch to incremental conversion. The count-the-islands one was fun but hard to fit into a 45minute interview.

Eventually most of those started getting spoiled too lol.

New comment by strstr in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:53:07 +0000

Who does a sort for this D:

New comment by strstr in "[dead]"

strstr — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:53:10 +0000

Title: Android 17 is here

Powering the next era of Confidential AI

strstr — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:44:59 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/powering-the-next-era-of-confidential-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48495455

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by strstr in "Sergey Brin told Google staff that working 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot'"

strstr — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:16:46 +0000

[2025]

New comment by strstr in "Investigating Split Locks on x86-64"

strstr — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:17:24 +0000

Split locks are weird. It’s never been obvious to me why you’d want to do them unless you are on a small core count system. When split lock detection rolled out for linux, it massacred perf for some games (which were probably min-maxing single core perf and didn’t care about noisy neighbor effects).

Frankly, I’m surprised split lock detection is enabled anywhere outside of multi-tenant clouds.

New comment by strstr in "The AI Vampire"

strstr — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:05:58 +0000

Popular blogger from roughly a decade ago. His rants were frequently cited early in my career. I think he’s fallen off in popularity substantially since.

New comment by strstr in "List animals until failure"

strstr — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:21:56 +0000

This is more of a typing game than anything else. It rejected “blackcapped chickadee” (wanted black-capped chickadee). Frankly that felt a bit tedious on a phone. Had to scrub through to correct and lost.

New comment by strstr in "The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]"

strstr — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:50:05 +0000

My suspicion is that the bot was a fairly standard chess bot, but the difficulties were set based on computation time. As airplane computers got better, it turned into a beast.

As a result, if you tried this on older planes, it might have been “easier”

New comment by strstr in "Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed"

strstr — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 01:29:14 +0000

For my personal usage of ai-studio, I had to use autohotkey to record and replay my mouse deleting my old chats. I thought about cooking up a browser extension, but never got around to it.

New comment by strstr in "LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted"

strstr — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:49:15 +0000

How much are my eyeballs worth over the lifetime of a TV?

In the race to the bottom, ads will outcompete others by pushing price lower. But how much lower?

Fractal Imaginary Cubes

strstr — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:08:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.i.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp/users/tsuiki/icube/fractal/index-e.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560864

Points: 63

# Comments: 8

New comment by strstr in "Google CTF 2025 – webz : Exploiting zlib's Huffman Code Table"

strstr — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 19:57:33 +0000

Legitimately, they are often too hard. Balancing the problems is quite challenging.

On top of that, the solutions often make the problems seem much intimidating than they are (not that they are easy). Most solutions involve a lot of “happenstance”, where someone tried something and it got an outcome that was useful, which they build on top of. This makes the solutions look crazy complicated (“how would i have ever thought of this!?”), when in reality they are Rube Goldberg machines built out of duct tape and baling wire.

I’ve only solved a few Google CTF problems, and one of them was the one I wrote, lol. That was nearly a decade ago though.